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Powerpoint Master Slide animation

Question

Using the Popwerpoint Interop Dll, I can get the information about the Master Slide and any animation that are specified in master slide. Anyslide in that presentation may inherit these animation if it continues using the same template, but it can also ignore these animations and have something of its own. While accessing .ppt files using Interop dll, I am not able to figure out if a specific slide has inherited those animations from master slide or not. In my slide if I iterate over the shapes I don't get any information as to do I have to use the animations from the time line or need to use the animations from the master slide.

The Shapes that belong to the master slide would only be present in the SlideMaster object and not the normal slide object. However, if you have a Shape object and would like to find out if it were from a master slide, use the Shape.Parent property.

I don't have any problem with shapes. I have problem with the effects applied on those shapes.

Suppose, I have added 'appear' effect in my slideMaster for level-1 paragraph.

Case1: In my actual slide , it shows 'master:body' in custom-animation panel.If we play the slide then 'appear' effect gets applied appropriately on the paragraphs present on this slide though the effect is actually not part of timeline of this slide. If you have some other effect ( say 'crowl' ) explicitly added to this slide, then it gets played after all the appropriate effects derived from masterSlide.

Case2: You can "copy effects to the slide" by right clicking on the 'master:body' node. Then those effects become part of the timeline of this slide. Now you can change them , delete them , change order etc.

And at runtime, they get played as per the changes done by you ...and NOT as per what masterSlide says.

I am not able to handle this case2 as I am not able to figure out if "copy effects to the slide" has already happened or not. And hence I am by default first considering the effects given by slideMaster and then the effects from the timeline of the slide. This is resulting in to duplication of effects and/or incorrect sequence of effects.

Could you please help me on handling case2 given above?

For a given slide , how can I find out whether 'copy effects to slide'

(1) If it is a non-editable shape (it cant be edited in the normal slide) then a copy of the shape is maintained only in the master slide and you will not find this shape in Slide.Shapes of the normal slide (as explained in my previous post) - this makes sense - why make duplicate copies?

(2) If it is a editable shape (like all the placeholders for body, title ...) then a copy of the shape is maintained in each of the normal slides that refer to the master slide - this makes sense because each slide will have its own customization of the shape

Your example falls into category (2), which means that a copy of the "body" shape will exist in each and every slide that refer to the master slide. So, whether or not "copy effects to slide" is clicked, the animation settings will be present in the shape in the normal slide. The only advantage of clicking the "copy effects to slide" is that these animation settings become editable through the GUI.

Sorry for the delay. As of now I have not found a way to find animation sequences that are part of editable shapes (except the first animation effect) that have been derived from the master slide. I have started colloboration with other teams on this case and will give a confirmed answer within this week.